Chapter 14 Seven Years
Seven Years
Anton:
Ruslan's needles don't just break men; they dissolve them from the inside out.
"Dead drop. Red Hook shipping yards." Sergei Petrosyan's words slide into each other, thick and syrupy.
His pupils have consumed his irises entirely, leaving nothing but black moons ringed in bloodshot white.
"Cash in a locker. Instructions on burner phone.
" He blinks slowly, like his eyelids weigh fifty pounds each.
"Phone wiped itself clean as soon as I finished reading the messages. "
His partner remains motionless in the chair beside him, chin collapsed against his chest. The rise and fall of his breathing comes steady and deep.
Ruslan kept that one sedated as backup insurance.
One conscious confessor provides all the information we need when the pharmaceutical cocktail performs this efficiently.
When the compounds flush from their systems in six to eight hours, they'll remember fragments. Fever dreams. Chemical hallucinations. Nothing concrete enough to identify or testify about. Just the lingering sense that they talked too much while riding a very bad high.
We stay cloaked in shadow and black balaclavas, anonymous shapes in the dark.
Digital masks strip my voice of identifying markers when I speak. "Tell me about the Morrison job."
Petrosyan tries to focus. His head lolls sideways before jerking back up.
"We didn't...we didn't kill him. Dead already.
" His words tumble over each other. "We just..
.we just moved him. Made it look like our work.
" Petrosyan's head drops forward. "Boss said take the body, leave our signature, make it obvious.
Said we'd get paid double. Said it would look right. "
Across the room, Yuri photographs the unconscious Armenian's exposed forearms with his phone.
"Is your boss Markov?"
"Markov. Gregor Markov." Petrosyan's eyes drift closed. "But he takes orders from higher up. Don't know who. Never met him."
"Were you after the girl at the boutique?"
"Ah, the Quinn girl." His tongue works slowly. "The no kill. Boss was specific, no killing the girl. Just take her, make it look like chaos, get her out." His head lolls.
"Where were you supposed to bring her?"
"Red Hook. Shipping container." His words slur together now. "Number texted on the burner. Container 4-7-B-2. We had twelve hours to deliver her alive and unharmed." He blinks slowly.
I sink deeper into the shadows, listening to chemical confessions spill into the dark that carve new fractures through my control.
"Shane, the Irish guard. Was he part of this arrangement?"
Petrosyan's mouth works soundlessly before words emerge. "Don't know him. Didn't work with any guards." His head leans to the right. "Just supposed to grab the girl during the confusion."
"Where were you?"
"We were waiting." The words drag slowly as molasses. "The different crew...got territorial, started firing at everything." His eyelids flutter. "We pulled back when it turned into a bloodbath."
"Would you have killed her?"
Yuri looks at me, sharp, assessing, cautious. The kind of look that says, "Don't do what you're thinking."
"For what they're paying?" Petrosyan's drugged laugh sounds hollow. "I'd do anything. Kill her, kill you, kill my own mother." His head drops forward again. "Money's money. Girl's just a job."
The Glock slides from my shoulder holster before thought catches up to movement. Metal whispers against leather. Cold weight settles into my palm. My hands move through muscle memory, threading the suppressor onto the barrel.
Ruslan doesn't move from his position near the door, but I feel his attention sharpen. Neither speaks. They know better than to question when violence crystallizes in my silence.
I level the weapon at Petrosyan's forehead. His pupils remain dilated and unfocused, too chemically-soaked to register the threat.
"Got a message last night." His tongue works against his teeth. "Said to stay ready. The payment doubles if we bring her in without a scratch."
"What message? Show me."
"Burner they gave us. Message came through encrypted app."
Yuri lifts the burner from the table. He meets my eyes over Petrosyan's lolling head and shakes once. His gaze tells me everything. The phone's clean.
My finger rests against the trigger guard. Light pressure. Two pounds from ending this. But dead men can't lead me to whoever ordered this. They're worth more alive. Breathing, talking, unknowingly marking a trail straight to who thought he could take what's mine.
I lower my gun. They're already dead. They just don't know it yet.
Ruslan appears beside me, another syringe catching the overhead light. "Want me to wake the other one?"
I study the unconscious Armenian. His head hangs at an angle that would be uncomfortable if he were aware enough to feel it.
"No. Take this one to the sleeping world."
Ruslan's syringe finds the Armenian's neck, and the plunger descends smoothly and steadily. Within seconds, the man's breathing shifts deeper, settling into the manufactured unconsciousness that will keep him under for hours.
Yuri comes over to photograph his tattoos.
"What is it with their tattoos?"
Yuri angles his phone toward me. The screen illuminates intricate designs sprawling across the man's forearms.
"I've seen these before." Yuri's jaw moves side-to-side. It's an unconscious tic he gets when his brain starts connecting patterns. "Can't place the context yet, but the combination feels familiar."
I study the photos over his shoulder. Armenian prison work, mostly. The crude eight-pointed star marks him as a vor, standard criminal hierarchy. The dagger through a rose means he's killed for money. Nothing particularly noteworthy. Men in our world wear their résumés on their skin.
But Yuri doesn't flag things without reason. The man catalogs information like other people breathe.
Yuri zooms in on another section, studying it with the focused intensity he reserves for puzzles that matter. "That sword. From the Motherland Calls. Volgograd."
"These men are obviously not Russian."
"Volgograd ink on Armenian skin. The Russian Motherland's sword isn't something you tattoo unless you're..."
"Can you wake them?"
Ruslan glances at the two unconscious men, calculating. "Could try." His ice-blue stare shifts back to me. "Might kill them with an OD. Already loaded them up pretty heavy with the cocktail. Their systems are flooded."
I study Petrosyan's slack features, the slow rise and fall of his chest. "Odds?"
"Sixty-forty they survive the reversal agents. Maybe worse if their hearts are weak."
The shipping container number sits in my head like a lit fuse. 4-7-B-2. These two breathing pieces of shit represent the only thread connecting us to whoever ordered Fee taken.
"We keep them alive, and we follow their tracks."
Yuri's already on it. "I'm asking Dimitri about these tattoos on Armenian skin. The old man has been here in New York with the Basovs since, shit, before we were born. He can get the street intel. I'll haunt the digital world."
That's what Yuri does. Finds patterns in chaos. Connects data points separated by years and continents until the picture becomes clear. He doesn't just gather information—he interprets it, profiles it, turns fragments into actionable intelligence.
Yuri is invaluable. I trust his instincts when something "feels familiar" even before he can articulate why.
Ruslan's moving between the chairs, checking vitals with clinical detachment. He adjusts Petrosyan's position, arranging him to suggest he collapsed mid-fix. "They'll wake up with gaps in their memory and track marks they can't explain."
Then Ruslan transforms crime scenes into accidents, murders into misfortunes, interrogations into anything needed. He's good. "Tox screens will show exactly what I want them to show, if they get one."
When we're done, we exit through the back stairwell, leaving behind two men who are living on borrowed time.
The flower shop on Amsterdam Avenue glows warm against the gray morning light. 7:00 AM sharp. Early enough that foot traffic hasn't yet clogged the sidewalks, late enough that Irma Castellano will already be inside preparing the day's arrangements.
I push through the glass door. Bells chime overhead.
"Senor Baev!" Irma emerges from the back room, wiping her hands on her apron. Her salt-and-pepper hair pulls back in its usual neat bun. Deep laugh lines mark her face. "So early this morning."
Her father started this shop forty years ago. Built it into something that survived every economic downturn. Now Irma runs it while he spends his mornings drinking coffee and spending time with his wife and grandkids.
"The white roses yesterday." I stop at the counter. "Tell me about that order."
Her hands go still on the ribbon she's been working on. Worry creases her forehead. "I got the standing order reactivated." She straightens. "Didn't want to fall from your graces, Senor Baev. So when the order came through again, I filled it right away."
"Who placed the order?"
"It came through the system." She gestures toward the computer tucked beneath the counter. "Same account you always used. I thought..." She trails off, reading something in my face. "Did I do something wrong, Senor Baev?"
"You didn't do anything wrong, Irma. But from now on, you take flower orders directly from me. No automated systems. No online requests. If someone claiming to be me contacts you through any other method, you call this number immediately."
I slide a card across the counter. Plain white, nothing but ten digits printed in black ink.
She picks it up carefully like it might bite her. The shop settles into silence.
Outside, a delivery truck rumbles past. Someone's already started hosing down the sidewalk two doors down.